William Michael Rossetti

“ Disease was sapping his vitals, pain wrung him, Death beckoned him with finger more and more imperative. Poetic fame became the vision of Tantalus, and love the clasp of Ixion.
Such was the life, or such the incipient death, of Keats, in the last twelvemonth of his brief existence.
For half a year prior to February 1820 he had been unrestful and cheerless. “Either that gloom overspread me,” so he wrote to James Rice, “or I was suffering under some passionate feeling, or, if I turned to versify, that exacerbated the poison of either sensation.” ”

“ From this point forwards nothing but misery remains to be recorded of John Keats. The narrative becomes depressing to write and depressing to read. The sensation is like that of being confined in a dark vault at noonday. One knows, indeed, that the sun of the poet’s genius is blazing outside, and that, on emerging from the vault, we shall be restored to light and warmth; but the atmosphere within is not the less dark and laden, nor the shades the less murky. ”

“ I have now gone through the principal points which appear to me to identify Keats as a man, and to throw light upon his character and habits. He entered on life high-spirited, ardent, impulsive, vehement; with plenty of self-confidence, ballasted with a large capacity (though he did not always exercise it to a practical result) for self-criticism; longing to be a poet, and firmly believing that he could and would be one; resolute to be a man—unselfish, kindly, and generous. ”

“ I am in a state at present in which woman, merely as woman, can have no more power over me than stocks and stones; and yet the difference of my sensations with respect to Miss Brawne and my sister is amazing. The one seems to absorb the other to a degree incredible. I seldom think of my brother and sister in America. The thought of leaving Miss Brawne is beyond everything horrible—the sense of darkness coming over me—I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing. Some of the phrases she was in the habit of using during my last nursing at Wentworth Place ring in my ears. Is there another life? ”

“ True, the Bacchante is in fact Diana herself; but of this Endymion knows nothing at all, and he deliberately—or rather with fatuous precipitancy—gives up the glorious goddess for the sentimental and beguiling wine-bibber. Diana, when she re-assumes her proper person, has not a word of reproach to level at him. This may possibly be true to the nature of a goddess—it is certainly not so to that of a woman; and it is the only crisis at which she shows herself different from womanhood—shall we say superior to it? ”

“ The emotion throughout is the emotion of beauty: beauty intensely perceived, [195] intensely loved, questioned of its secret like the sphinx, imperishable and eternal, yet haunted (as it were) by its own ghost, the mortal throes of the human soul. As no poet had more capacity for enjoyment than Keats, so none exceeded him in the luxury of sorrow. Few also exceeded him in the sense of the one moment irretrievable; but this conception in its fulness belongs to the region of morals yet more than of sensation, and the spirit of Keats was almost an alien in the region of morals. ”

“ Leigh Hunt (born in 1784, and therefore Keats’s senior by some eleven years) is known to us all as a fresh and airy essayist, a fresh and airy poet, a liberal thinker in the morals both of society and of politics (hardly a politician in the stricter sense of the term) , a charming companion, a too-constant cracker of genial jocosities and of puns. He understood good literature both instinctively and critically; but was too full of tricksy mannerisms, and of petted byways in thought and style, to be an altogether safe associate for a youthful literary aspirant, whether as model or as Mentor. ”

“ The worst of men are those whose self-interests are their passions; the next, those whose passions are their self-interest. Upon the whole, I dislike mankind. Whatever people on the other side of the question may advance, they cannot deny that we are always surprised at hearing of a good action, and never of a bad one.... If you were in England, I dare say you would be able to pick out more amusement from society than I am able to do. To me it is as dull as Louisville is to you. [Then follow several remarks on Hunt, Haydon, the Misses Reynolds, and Dilke.] ”

“ The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy. But there is a space of life between in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted. ”

“ It lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—it has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity: he is continually in for, and filling, some other body. ”

“ People are revengeful: do not mind them. Do nothing but love me: if I knew that for certain, life and health will in such event be a heaven, and death [50] itself will be less painful. I long to believe in immortality: I shall never be able to bid you an entire farewell. If I am destined to be happy with you here, how short is the longest life! I wish to believe in immortality—I wish to live with you for ever. ”

“ It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must create itself. In ‘Endymion’ I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. I was never afraid of failure, for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest. But I am nigh getting into a rant; so, with remembrances to Taylor and Woodhouse, &c., I am yours very sincerely,
“John Keats.” ”

“ Keats seems to me to have been naturally a man of complex character, many-mooded, with a tendency to perverse self-conflict. The circumstances of his brief career—his poetic ambition, his want of any definite employment, his association with men of literary occupation or taste whom he only half approved, the critical venom poured forth against him, his love thwarted by a mortal malady—all these things tended to bring out the unruly or morbid, and to deplete the many fine and solid, elements in his nature. ”

“ Wilfulness along with waywardness is certainly not quite the same thing as “power of will,” but it testifies to a will which can exert itself steadily if it likes. The very short duration of Keats’s life, and the painful conjuncture of circumstances which made his last year a despairing struggle between a passionate love and an inexorable disease, preclude our forming a very distinct opinion of what his power of will might naturally have become. ”

“ Without tying down Keats too rigidly to this view of the genesis of the myth, I may nevertheless point out that he wholly ignores as participants both the spirit of religious devoutness, and the device of allegorizing natural phænomena: the inventor is simply a poet and lover, who thinks it a world of pities that such a sweet maiden as Artemis should not have a lover sooner or later. Invention prompted by warmth of feeling is thus the sole motive-power recognized. ”

“ Even as a matter of present interest, the attempt to crush me in The Quarterly has only brought me more into notice, and it is a common expression among book-men, ‘I wonder The Quarterly should cut its own throat.’ It does me not the least harm in society to make me appear little and ridiculous. I know when a man is superior to me, and give him all due respect; he will be the last to laugh at me; and as for the rest, I feel that I make an impression upon them which ensures me personal respect while I am in sight, whatever they may say when my back is turned.... ”

“ When I was a schoolboy I thought a fair woman a pure goddess; my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not. I have no right to expect more than their reality. I thought them ethereal—above men; I find them perhaps equal—great by comparison is very small. Insult may be inflicted in more ways than by word or action. One who is tender of being insulted does not like to think an insult against another. I do not like to think insults in a lady’s company ”

“ If Shelley’s poems had defects—which they indisputably had—Keats’s poems also had defects. After all that can be said in their praise—and this should be said in the most generous or rather grateful and thankful spirit—it seems to me true that not many of Keats’s poems are highly admirable; that most of them, amid all their beauty, have an adolescent and frequently a morbid tone, marking want of manful thew and sinew and of mental balance; that he is not seldom obscure, chiefly through indifference to the thought itself and its necessary means of development ”

“ Adonis woke up from his trance, and Venus came to solace him with love. Venus spoke soothingly also to Endymion, telling him that she knew of his love for some one of the immortals, but who this was she had failed to fathom. She promised that one day he should be blessed, and with Adonis she then rose heavenward in her car. The earth closed, and Endymion gladly pursued his way through caves, jewels, and water-springs. ”

“ We have seen, in one of Keats’s letters to Miss Brawne, that he shrank from the thought of having their mutual love made known to any of their friends. But he went further than this. As well after as before he had fallen in love with Miss Brawne, and had become engaged to her, he could express a contrary state of feeling. Thus, in addressing Mr. Taylor, on August 23, 1819, he says: “I equally dislike the favour of the public with the love of a woman; they are both a cloying treacle to the wings of independence.” ”

“ I rate it far above “Isabella”—and indeed above all those poems of Keats, not purely lyrical, in which human or quasi-human agents bear their part, except only the ballad “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” and the uncompleted “Eve of St. Mark.” “Hyperion” stands aloof in lonely majesty; but I think that, in the long run, even “Hyperion” represents the genius of Keats less adequately, and past question less characteristically, than “The Eve of St. Agnes.” The story of this fascinating poem is so meagre as to be almost nugatory. ”

“ Other wines of a heavy and spirituous nature transform a man into a Silenus: this makes him a Hermes, and gives a woman the soul and immortality of an Ariadne.... I said this same claret is the only palate-passion I have: I forgot game. I must plead guilty to the breast of a partridge, the back of a hare, the backbone of a grouse, the wing and side of a pheasant, and a woodcock passim.”
At a rather later date, October 1819, Keats had “left off animal food, that my brains may never henceforth be in a greater mist than is theirs by nature.” ”

“ I cannot but feel indebted to those gentlemen who have taken my part. As for the rest, I begin to get a little acquainted with my own strength and weakness. Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works. My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or The Quarterly could possibly inflict ”

“ The sun, the moon, the sea, and men and women who are creatures of impulse, are poetical, and have about them an unchangeable attribute: the poet has none, no identity. He is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures. If then he has no self, and if I am a poet, where is the wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I not at that very instant have been cogitating on the characters of Saturn and Ops? ”

“ The critic who is a critic—and not a Quarterly or a Blackwood reviewer or lampooner—is well aware of the disproportion between his power of estimation, and the demand which such a genius as that of Keats, and such work as the maturest which he produced, make upon the estimating faculty. ”

“ What island do your friends propose retiring to? I should be happy to go with you there alone, but in company I should object to it: the backbitings and jealousies of new colonists, who have nothing else to amuse themselves, is unbearable. Mr. Dilke came to see me yesterday, and gave me a very great deal more pain than pleasure. I shall never be able any more to endure the society of any of those who used to meet at [52] Elm Cottage [8] and Wentworth Place. The last two years taste like brass upon my palate. If I cannot live with you, I will live alone. ”

“ She walks across a room in such a manner that a man is drawn to her with a magnetic power; this they call flirting! They do not know things; they do not know what a woman is. I believe, though, she has faults, the same as Charmian and Cleopatra might have had. Yet she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way; for there are two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things:—the worldly, theatrical, and pantomimical; and the unearthly, spiritual, and ethereal. In the former, Bonaparte, Lord Byron, and this Charmian, hold the first place in our mind ”

“ Every hour I am more and more concentrated in you; everything else tastes like chaff in my mouth. I feel it almost impossible to go to Italy. The fact is, I cannot leave you, and shall never taste one minute’s content until it pleases chance to let me live with you for good. But I will not go on at this rate. A person in health, as you are, can have no conception of the horrors that nerves and a temper like mine go through. ”

“ As a man of the world, I love the rich talk of a Charmian; as an eternal being, I love the thought of you. I should like her to ruin me, and I should like you to save me.”
So much for Miss Cox, the Charmian whom Keats was not in love with. This is not absolutely the sole mention of her in his letters, but it is the only one of importance. We now turn to Miss Brawne, the young lady with whom he had fallen very much in love at a date even preceding that to which the present description must belong. ”

“ There are long lives, and there are eventful lives: there are also short lives, and uneventful ones. Keats’s life was both short and uneventful. To the differing classes of lives different modes of treatment may properly be applied by the biographer. In the case of a writer whose life was both long and eventful, I might feel disposed to carry the whole narrative forward pari passu, and to exhibit in one panorama the outward and the inward career, the incidents and the product, the doings and environment, and the writings, acting and re-acting upon one another. ”